Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

But though altars were numerous, temples were not plentiful. The chief seats of religious worship were "the high-places," level spots on the summits of hills or mountains, where altars were erected, and the worshipper was believed to be nearer the dwelling-place of the gods than he would have been in the plain below. The altar was frequently some natural boulder of rock, consecrated by holy oil, and regarded as the habitation of a god. These sacred stones were termed beth-els, bætyli as the Greeks wrote the word, and they form a distinguishing characteristic of Semitic faith. In later times many of them were imagined to have "come down from heaven." So deeply enrooted was this worship of stones in the Semitic nature, that even Mohammed, in spite of his iconoclastic zeal, was obliged to accommodate his creed to the worship of the Black Stone at Mekka, and the Kaaba is still one of the most venerated objects of the Mohammedan faith.

But the sacred stone was not only an object of worship or the consecrated altar of a deity, it might also take the place of a temple, and so be in very truth a beth-el, or "house of God." Thus at Medain Salih in North-western Arabia Mr. Doughty discovered three upright stones, which an inscription informed him were the mesged or "mosque" of the god Aera of Bozrah. In the great temple of Melkarth at Tyre Herodotus saw two columns, one of gold, the other of emerald, reminding us of the two pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which the Phoenician architect of Solomon erected in the porch of the temple at Jerusalem (1 Kings vii. 21). Similar columns of stone have been found in the Phoenician temple, called that of the Giants, in Gozo, one of which is still standing in its place.

While certain stones were thus regarded as the abode of deity, the high places whereon so many of them stood also received religious worship. The most prominent of the mountains of Syria were deified: Carmel became a Penu-el or "Face of God," Hermon was "the Holy One," and Mount Lebanon was a Baal. The rivers and springs also were adored as gods, and the fish which swam in them were accounted sacred. On the Phoenician coast was a river Kadisha, "the holy," and the Canaanite maiden saw in the red marl which the river Adonis brought down from the hills the blood of the slaughtered Sun-god Tammuz.

The temple of Solomon, built as it was by Phoenician architects and workmen, will give us an idea of what a Canaanitish temple was like. In its main outlines it resembled a temple in Babylonia or Assyria. There, too, there was an outer court and an inner sanctuary, with its parakku or "mercy-seat," and its ark of stone or wood, in which an inscribed tablet of stone was kept. Like the temple of Jerusalem, the Babylonian temple looked from the outside much like a rectangular box, with its four walls rising up, blank and unadorned, to the sky. Within the open court was a "sea," supported at times on oxen of bronze, where the priests and servants of the temple performed their ablutions and the sacred vessels were washed.

The Canaanitish altar was approached by steps, and was large enough for the sacrifice of an ox. Besides the sacrifices, offerings of corn and wine, of fruit and oil were also made to the gods. The sacrifices and offerings were of two kinds, the zau'at or sin-offering, and the shelem or thank-offering. The sin-offering had to be given wholly to the god, and was accordingly termed kalil or "complete"; a part of the thank-offering, on the other hand, might be carried away by him who made it. Birds, moreover, might constitute a thank-offering; they were not allowed when the offering was made for sin. Such at least was the rule in the later days of Phoenician ritual, to which belong the sacrificial tariffs that have been preserved.

In these sacrificial tariffs no mention is made of human sacrifices, and, as M. Clermont-Ganneau has pointed out, the ram takes in them the place of the man. But this was the result of the milder manners of an age when the Phoenicians had been brought into close contact with the Greeks. In the older days of Canaanitish history human sacrifice had held a foremost place in the ritual of Syria. It was the sacrifice of the firstborn son that was demanded in times of danger and trouble, or when the family was called upon to make a special atonement for sin. The victim was offered as a burnt sacrifice, which in Hebrew idiom was euphemistically described as passing through the fire.

Side by side with these human sacrifices were the abominations which were performed in the temples in honour of Ashtoreth. Women acted as prostitutes, and men who called themselves "dogs" foreswore their manhood. It was these sensualities practised in the name of religion which caused the iniquity of the Canaanites to become full.

It is pleasanter to turn to such fragments of Canaanitish mythology and cosmological speculation as have come down to us. Unfortunately most of it belongs in its present form to the late days of Greek and Roman domination, when an attempt was made to fuse the disjointed legends of the various Phoenician states into a connected whole, and to present them to Greek readers under a philosophical guise. How much, therefore, of the strange cosmogony and history of the gods recorded by Philon of Gebal really goes back to the patriarchal epoch of Palestine, and how much of it is of later growth, it is now impossible to say. In the main, however, it is of ancient date.

This is shown by the fact that a good deal of it has been borrowed directly or indirectly from Babylonia. How this could have happened has been explained by the Tel el-Amarna tablets. It was while Canaan was under the influence of Babylonian culture and Babylonian government that the myths and traditions of Babylonia made their way to the West. Among the tablets are portions of Babylonian legends, one of which has been carefully annotated by the Egyptian or Canaanite scribe. It is the story of the queen of Hades, who had been asked by the gods to a feast they had made in the heavens. Unable or unwilling to ascend to it, the goddess sent her servant the plague-demon, but with the result that Nergal was commissioned to descend to Hades and destroy its mistress. The fourteen gates of the infernal world, each with its attendant warder, were opened before him, and at last he seized the queen by the hair, dragging her to the ground, and threatening to cut off her head. But Eris-kigal, the queen of Hades, made a successful appeal for mercy; she became the wife of Nergal, and he the lord of the tomb.